I suppose I could create a bridge between them, but sometimes it’s fun to just watch.
July 14th, 2009
March 13th, 2009
[Disclaimer: The following post is partly a reprise of one I wrote last year]
March Madness is almost here, and my workplace productivity is bound to suffer a little (don’t worry Kyte crew — I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). Selection Sunday is this weekend, and then it’s all about bracketology. I always look around the Internetz for a little help, and there’s no shortage of resources out there. There are roughly three ways to approach it…
Tap the hive mind
Yahoo Sports has an application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Imagine the Yahoo Answers kids attacking this one. Yikes.
Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke and UCLA, for example, have a lot of them – and haters too for that matter, so no matter how viable they might be as contenders, I would worry about people expressing their desires instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven – in a way and in part – by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.
Turn to the Experts
I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Taken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seeds, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there – separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch” – so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:
Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions – especially whole brackets.
DIY science geekery
This is especially fertile ground for data junkies. Impress your friends by rattling off the latest betting odds or spouting opinions about how the Pomeroy Pythag Model stacks up against the Key Game Play stats model – if you can find any of this info for free. If you’re willing to pay, however, there are all kinds of nifty online tools to play with. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. It costs anywhere from $26.95 to $79.95, although they do offer a free version that gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.
You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with the weightings of all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.
Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.
Finally, one category of basketball statistics – efficiency – has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.
A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). Last year, a Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn wrote a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is (the actual post seems to have moved), which he nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”
OK, back to work everyone.
February 19th, 2009
Kyte’s super-simple content production features are perfect for engaging fans of a show like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, so it’s cool to see how the Travel Channel used the Kyte platform to power their new “No Reservations: Hungry for More” Facebook app. Foodies are passionate people, and Bourdain has a way of provoking them, which should bode well for this UGC campaign.
The Hungry for More application allows people to share their favorite food, travel and culture-related experiences and then pits them against each other in a competition to create the best reviews.
To add your own review, you simply search for a business…
Click on a big review button…
Then… and this is where Kyte comes in… you can upload pictures or a video file, or click to fire up your webcam and record something on the spot. Once you select a file (or a set of pictures, which Kyte will automatically stitch into a slide show), it’s just one more click to broadcast it.
So get started, and see how your schtick stacks up against Bourdain himself, whose own reviews are starting to make their way onto the map…
January 12th, 2009
I mentioned in an earlier post that for the past few months I’ve been working with Kyte. That’s their widget above. My lineup of shows so far is pretty weak, but the thing I really want to talk about is the product.
It’s pretty powerful, and feature-packed. Users can produce and broadcast shows instantly (even broadcast live) from a webcam or supported mobile phones (right now, Nokia’s S60 handsets are our flagship devices), or they can upload beautifully produced and edited high-quality videos and use Kyte simply as the publishing platform.
The content is what attracts the audience, but once the audience is there they can engage more deeply with things like chat, comments and ratings. They can also grab the widget and embed it on MySpace pages, Facebook profiles, blogs, etc. It’s a completely decentralized experience, but no matter where people discover and engage with the widget, they are all participating with each other in real time.
Kyte users can then monetize this audience via a number of different ad formats (pre-rolls, overlays, banners, etc.) and solutions (ad server integration, ad networks).
Kyte started as a destination website for user-generated online video, in the vein of YouTube, but they got a lot of traction with some pretty high-profile customers, and over the last year they’ve repositioned themselves as an enabling platform.
This is an exciting time for me to have joined Kyte, because we are planning to roll out a whole bunch of new features in the coming months to round out the platform strategy, and also because the current product needs some streamlining. As I mention in the video above, it’s like a Swiss Army Knife with too many tools open at once. This makes some obvious features too hard to use, and it makes other features too hard to discover.
We’re also rolling out a lot of new stuff for mobile devices. I’m not sure what I’m specifically allowed to mention, so I’ll just leave it at that. But basically, I’m stoked because I’m working on a very cool product, and I’m working with some of Kyte’s partners doing pretty amazing things with it. As a case in point, 50 cent’s Kyte channel surpassed 50 million views last month!
Lastly, here are a few of Kyte’s high-profile users:
Lots more here
December 3rd, 2008
Just a year ago, two of my most powerful Internet addictions were Yahoo Fantasy Sports and Yelp. Now, I hardly think about either one.
Yelp made me ‘Elite‘ in 2007, which was a nice surprise. By the end of that year, however, my review pace had really tapered off, so I was even more surprised they made me Elite again in ‘08. I’m almost certain it won’t happen again this time around. I don’t think I wrote more than a dozen reviews this year. I haven’t even hit 100 – a milestone I had expected to reach a long time ago.
The capper came this week when I tried to RSVP for the Yelp holiday party at the Exploratorium. I was politely rejected. So much for Elite status. That makes two entire years of Eliteness without a single Yelp party to show for it. Every Elite soiree I tried to RSVP to was full before I even saw the announcement in my inbox. I scored a pass to the holiday party of ‘06 – at the California Academy of Sciences – but a long time friend of mine made a surprise visit to SF that weekend, and Yelp wouldn’t let me in with my impromptu guest. I don’t blame them. I’m just saying.
So what happened? Why don’t I Yelp anymore?
For one thing, I got really busy. Rarely in my career have I been as busy as I was this past summer, and any non-essential web activity all but ceased for several months. Then, after the busy time, there was a recovery period during which I lacked the brain power for the kind of pith and wit Yelp demands.
Mainly though, I just didn’t have very many truly notable restaurant experiences. I’m just not motivated to write a three-star review for a three-star experience that basically met my expectations.
Even on the rare occasion when I was wowed – by an amazing 11-course tasting menu at Coi on my birthday for example – it just felt somehow pointless to put my own opinion on the pile with 140 others. I’d give it four or five stars, which is what it’s averaging. I’d praise it for things that have been said 120 times already. And for restaurants like Coi, there are always a handful of haters with their one-star reviews. Someone’s piece of chicken was raw in the middle. Someone thought the waiter got snippy. Someone had to wait til 8:35 for a table, even though the reservation was for 8:00.
Every restaurant the same. Well, it’s more accurate to say there are a few archetypes:
There’s the fine dining restaurant that lives up to the hype (like Coi). Average of 4.5 stars but with five or six one star reviews (see above) and about twice that number of three-star reviews by people who adore a similar restaurant in another city.
There’s the beloved neighborhood joint. Again, average of 4-5 stars but from a huge number of reviews. Again, there are a few one-star reviews from people who don’t understand the concept of low-brow.
And so on.
The rest are meh restaurants that have – and deserve – a plurality of three-star reviews. Middle-of-the-road. Again, why bother reviewing these?
I used to live for the feedback I’d get when I posted a review. I still think Yelp’s system of compliments and the useful, funny, cool ratings are utter genius.
I’m still a huge consumer of Yelp. I use it all the time to decide where to eat. I basically use it as my Yellow Pages whenever I need to find or contact a local business. The integration of Google Maps – both on the website and in the iPhone app – is about as elegant as a UX can get. For that matter, the overall experience of Yelp is one of the best on the web, and I steal from it all the time when I’m designing apps or making recommendations to clients.
So what could get me contributing again?
- Yelp could encourage freshness (of reviews) by ‘retiring’ old ones to an archive or at least weighting the more recent reviews more heavily in the average. I have a hard time penning a review for a place that already has several hundred, especially when the average score is exactly what I’d give it.
- Yelp makes it easy – with Bookmarks – to keep track of places you’ve been or want to go, but after you bookmark a place, it’s easy to forget about it. Yelp could do more with these bookmarks – emailing reminders for example. And what if I could reply to the reminder with my review – email my review directly to my Yelp account? I would love that.
- More widgets and access through other channels. The ability to email reviews directly to my Yelp account would be great. A Facebook app would be nice. Maybe a Firefox add-on or a Mac OS widget. I find myself visiting actual websites less and less.
- Twitter. I wish I could drive traffic to my reviews by automatically tweeting whenever I post one.
- The girls of Yelp. Where is the love? You used to comment on my profile, send me compliments, private messages. No more… sigh.
Maybe I’ll come back to the Yelp fold one of these days, but until then, I still love y’all.
October 2nd, 2008
The economy is blowing up. The election has a certain circus quality to it – more than the usual presidential election. I started a new job (sort of). I’ve been traveling.
So why no blog posts?
Well, my official excuse is I’m working on a redesign of my website, and as part of that effort I’ll be splitting this blog into four separate blogs. So that’s quite a bit of work.
Also, I’ve been exercising for an hour every day after work, I’m reading a couple of books, I just built a website for my brother’s girlfriend to showcase her paintings, and I’m working on a similar one for my dad.
In short, my plate is full, but I hope to get back to blogging soon.
September 19th, 2008
It’s taken me a few days to write this post, partly because I’ve been busy (remarkable in itself, since I’m officially unemployed right now), and partly because I’m still not really sure what I want to say.
David Foster Wallace committed suicide last Friday, and the world lost an acrobatic writer and a dazzling mind. People either love or hate his fractured, self-conscious, self-interrupting, heavily-footnoted style. Some people dismiss it as pretentious or as a kind of academic pandering, but I think his suicide represents a final verdict that shows he was his own biggest critic.
I am a huge admirer of DFW, and I’m not sure there’s ever been another writer so versatile. His work is at times manic, funny, quiet, sad, high-flying, firmly-grounded. Most of it is so multi-dimensional it defies description. He was a virtuoso who came closer to representing the way our brains process life than anyone else I can think of. His magnum opus – Infinite Jest – was 1000+ pages long and packed with footnotes, but as you read it you recognize that your own mind produces this kind of fractured and multi-layered narrative about every second.
Finally, it’s crystal clear in his writing and in the way he would talk about his writing that he wrote out of love. It feels trite to actually write that here, but I think the whole of his writing has a tenderness running through it that is ultimately about the pain of modern life. He recognized how difficult it is to live in the world we’ve made for ourselves, especially for people inclined to examine it.
He was one of those people, and in the end he couldn’t endure what he was able to see.
September 11th, 2008
I’ve been off the grid for a couple weeks, backpacking with my brothers. We embarked a day or two after McCain announced his surprising (and IMHO almost surreal) choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. This, and she, dominated the headlines as we headed into the mountains, and I was hoping the shock and awe would have faded by the time we got back.
The press’s attention span is an interesting thing. It’s still all Palin all the time, and the Republicans seem to be fine with that. They can’t win on the issues, so why wouldn’t they be?
Anyway, I’ve designed a graphic for the new Republican ticket (above). Let me know if you want some stickers.
July 22nd, 2008
My friend Rebecca is thinking about purchasing a scooter. Not a leg-powered one (like the “Razor” that was so popular with dot-commers), but a real electric or gas job. She was asking me whether I thought it would be risky for her to park it on the street outside her apartment in the Mission (SF neighborhood), and we got to talking about ways she might prevent it from being stolen…
- A really big lock (duh, but doesn’t prevent someone from simply picking it up and tossing the scooter – lock and all – into the back of a truck)
- Cripple it (kill switch type of thing)
- Fake dog poo on the seat (the scarecrow approach)
- LoJack
- Secret GPS, hidden somewhere on the scooter (homemade LoJack)
- Stun Gun (explained by some shirtless dude)
- A laminated copy of her bank acount, stuck to the handlebars (hoping for the sympathy vote)
- A vial of crack, right on the seat – free for the taking (eliminate the middleman – i.e. take the crack, not the bike)
Anything else?
July 18th, 2008
Please indulge a moment of self-pity…
I know a designer’s job isn’t rocket science, but that doesn’t mean everyone is qualified to make design decisions. Unfortunately for me, that doesn’t ever seem to stop people.